THE SENSUAL PHILOSOPHER

Published: September 29, 1985

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Mr. Palomar worries and watches incessantly and in Italian; but William Weaver has me persuaded that I now know his fastidious, easily beguiled and graciously implacable mind in English. The rhythms and savors of Mr. Weaver's language can render equally well the punctilio of Mr. Palomar's intellectual searches and the civility and eroticism of his daydreams. It is a language that brings us nearer that destination which Mr. Palomar constantly aspires to - ''a step closer to true knowledge, which lies in the experience of the flavors, composed of memory and imagination at once.''

''Behind every cheese,'' he muses, ''there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries. This shop is a museum: Mr. Palomar, visiting it, feels as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed object the presence of the civilization that has given it form and takes form from it.''

Nevertheless, for all its sensual felicity, the writing is philosophically impelled. Mr. Palomar, who takes his name from the famous telescope and observatory, is both an ''I'' and an ''eye,'' ''A world looking at the world,'' as the title of one of Mr. Palomar's meditations suggests, a question mark retroactively affecting his own credibility: ''Is he not a piece of the world that is looking at another piece of the world? Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the 'I,' the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world. To look at itself, the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr. Palomar.''

Which mercifully takes us, Mr. Palomar and Italo Calvino beyond the impasse of solipsism, the distrust of language and the frigid fires of ''experiment.'' There may be a problem of knowledge, but the consciousness only comes alive to this problem by suffering those constant irrepressible appetites for experience which want to rampage beyond the prison of the self. Mr. Calvino may divide and categorize in triplicate the visual, the cultural and the speculative aspects of Mr. Palomar's world, he may prompt and tag and analyze and juxtapose to his (and our) heart's content, but Mr. Palomar himself remains wonderfully spontaneous and receptive to the pell-mell of the senses. Lawns, breasts, starlings, planets, lizards, the moon in the afternoon, the blackbird's whistle, the clack of mating tortoises, the fog of memories in ''Two Pounds of Goose Fat'' where ''in the thick, soft whiteness that fills the jars, the clangor of the world is muffled'' -all these things and a thousand others keep the mind from its ultimate shadow feast. Mr. Palomar may collapse at the end, like the book named for him, in a syllogism, but not before he has outstripped his conclusion in one incandescent apotheosis after another. I F it often seems in the course of this book that Mr. Calvino cannot put a foot wrong, this is because he is not a pedestrian writer. Like Robert Frost, his whole concern is for himself as a performer, but whereas Frost performed at eye-level, as it were, on vocal cords and heartstrings, Mr. Calvino is on the high wires, on lines of thought strung out above the big international circus. Yet such high-wire displays engage us only if the performer is in fact subject to gravity and genuinely at risk. A lightweight can throw the same shapes but cannot evince that old, single, open-mouthed stare of hope and wonder which we all still want to be a part of. What is most impressive about ''Mr. Palomar'' is a sense of the safety net being withdrawn at the end, of beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination being carried off not so much to dazzle an audience as to outface what the poet Philip Larkin calls ''the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do.'' ---This review was written before the death of Italo Calvino in Italy on Sept. 19.

WHO'S LOOKING? It has always happened that certain things -a stone wall, a seashell, a leaf, a teapot -present themselves to [Mr. Palomar] as if asking him for minute and prolonged attention: he starts observing them almost unawares, and his gaze begins to run over all the details and is then unable to detach itself. Mr. Palomar has decided that from now on he will redouble his attention. . . . Mr. Palomar tries staring at everything that comes within eyeshot; he feels no pleasure, and he stops. A second phase follows, in which he is convinced that only some things are to be looked at, others not, and he must go and seek the right ones. To do this, he has to face each time problems of selection . . . he soon realizes he is spoiling everything, as always when he involves his own ego. . . . But how can you look at something and set your own ego aside? Whose eyes are doing the looking? As a rule, you think of the ego as one who is peering out of your own eyes as if leaning on a window sill, looking at the world. . . . So, then: a window looks out on the world. The world is out there; and in here, what do we have? The world still - what else could there be? With a little effort of concentration, Mr. Palomar manages to shift the world from in front of him and set it on the sill, looking out. Now, beyond the window, what do we have? The world is also there, and for the occasion has been split into a looking world and a world looked at. And what about him, also known as ''I,'' namely Mr. Palomar? Is he not a piece of the world that is looking at another piece of the world? - From ''Mr. Palomar.''